In thee, O righteous Lord, I lay
The ground of all my creed;
Let not confusion disarray
My well form'd thoughts, but as I pray
My soul unto her safety speed

In the second sense: From an 1814 romance called "Alicia de Lacy," by Mrs. Jane West:

She had often been drenched with rain, while in the pursuit of pleasure, but she had not now, as was then the case, attendant damsels to prepare the bath, to help to disarray her, and present warm apparel scented with balmy odours.

And so we end this post where we began, with odor. First, the unbearable stench on a crowded ship headed to 17th century Virginia, and last, the aroma of a luxurious bath. In between, there's the smell of coffee and a flower. I like how, just by chance, the OEDs list of words yielded up quotes that emitted odors and that the odors are in order from bad to good.

As noted in the meandering update to the Megyn Kelly post, below, the Chan Romero recording was the first song where we heard the word "hippie" (spelled "hippy" on the label).

The first in-print use of the word, according to the OED, is in the 1953 novel "Night Light," by Douglass Wallop: "Man, I really get a bellyful of these would be hippies."

According to Amazon, that's "A novel about a man's search back through a dead killer's life for motive in the world of jazz by the author best known for his baseball novel ’The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.”"

Hey, that seems to augurate that today is the day the Yankees lose the pennant! It's either win or lose today, the 7th game of the American League Championship Series.

I thought I'd never heard of "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," but it's the novel that got made into the musical "Damn Yankees."

Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate's satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21st before the deal becomes final―and eternal. With the luscious temptress Lola to distract him, he'll have a hell of a time wriggling out of the bargain...

Here's the trailer for the 1958 movie they made out of the stage show:

That's Tab Hunter in the lead role. Remember when movie stars looked like this:

That's Tab with Natalie Wood at the 1956 Oscars. Warner Brothers was teaming them up as co-stars at the time. The 1956 movie was "The Burning Hills":

"... such as when a cameraman walked on-screen while Kelly was interviewing soccer player Carli Lloyd. The cameraman then could be audibly heard muttering an expletive, which wasn’t bleeped since the show is aired live. Other problems, though, fell entirely on Kelly’s shoulders. For instance, two days after a gunman killed 58 people and injured hundreds more in the Las Vegas mass shooting, she interrupted Tom Brokaw as the former 'NBC Nightly News' anchor spoke out against the NRA. Kelly spoke over Brokaw, saying 'Yep. Yep, got it. Gotta leave it at that, Tom. . . . We’re up against a hard break.'... Kelly is now reportedly having trouble booking celebrity guests, unlike the other blocs of 'Today,' according to Variety. 'I’m not booking anyone on her show,' one publicist, who requested not to be named, told the trade publication. 'I literally haven’t pitched anyone even from right out the gate. The buzz that is out there is so bad.'... [O]n many days, Kelly doesn’t have celebrities on her show at all, which is unusual for the 'Today' franchise. Instead, she often relies on lifestyle stories and pretaped features. One recent nearly five-and-a-half-minute segment, for example, followed Kelly and her real-life family as they went camping."

What a dismal slide for Kelly! Remember how high she was riding when she moderated that GOP debate? That was more than 2 years ago. She made a big leap that night, confronting Trump, and there was so much liberal hope for her when Trump went menstrual on her.

But Trump went on to win, and what use is she now? No use to celebrities, and now she can't get celebrities on her show, and what's a daytime talk show without celebrities? I don't watch daytime talk shows (or, really, night time talk shows). Because I can't stand the canned PR appearances celebrities do on TV these days. It used to be that celebrities might go on TV and be weird. I don't know — Marlon Brando, Bette Davis — I mean back in the day when we loved weirdness, real weirdness, not canned weirdness like Megyn Kelly pretending to find the beat to some overproduced pop music irresistible and just had to get up and dance....

Facebook reminds me of what it calls my "memories," even though they aren't my memories, because I'd forgotten all this:

1. Wrote a lot. 2. Walked 2 miles to Hilldale and bought 2 pairs of glasses with Theo frames. 3. Met Chris and drank a pomegranate martini. 4. Walked 2 miles back home. 5. Watched the 1934 movie "Bright Eyes" on TV and Meade watched it just because it's what I was watching. That was sweet of him. And Shirley was sweet. We laughed at Jane Withers and I was delighted that the actor who played Uncle Ned was the same actor who played Mr. Muckle in "It's a Gift," one of my all time favorite movies. Also the dog that played Rags was the same dog who played Toto 5 years later in "The Wizard of Oz."

Wisconsin State Journal reports on "the latest revelation of violent acts against staff members at the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, the state prison in Irma for the most serious young offenders in Wisconsin."

On Sept. 25, a group of male inmates in one of the prison’s housing units dipped the cord of an electric fan into a cup of water, poured water in a wall outlet and spilled some water on the floor near the fan, according to sources with direct knowledge of the incident but who do not have permission to speak publicly.

Many of the inmates in the unit then asked the guard to plug the fan into the wall outlet. The guard would have done so if an inmate had not, at the last minute, warned the guard not to plug in the fan....

The police were not called, the guard continued to work in this unit, inmates taunted him about how they almost succeeded in killing him, and no one was even punished.

In the last week, inmates have punched two other staff members, sending them both to the hospital — raising questions about the safety of staff at the facility.

The larger context is that there's a federal lawsuit, brought by inmates, alleging that the inmates have been abused, and there's a court order limiting discipline methods. There's also an FBI investigation. So you need to be somewhat skeptical about prison officials talking to the press about the inmates abusing the prison staff.

Inmates at the state’s youth prison have kicked in glass windows, stolen pepper spray and threatened to rape female staff members since a federal judge told state Department of Corrections officials to make drastic changes in how they manage prisoners’ behavior, records show....

The comments came after U.S. Judge James Peterson ordered prison officials in July not to keep inmates in solitary confinement around the clock for weeks, not to excessively pepper spray inmates and not to put them in shackles regularly.

“Kids now believe they have nothing to lose,” one staff member told Tiffany’s aides.

“I am afraid of getting killed by an inmate,” said another staff member who recently resigned.

How is it that the government hasn't figured out how to maintain discipline without round-the-clock solitary confinement for weeks, excessive pepper spraying, and routine shackling?! I feel sorry for low-level employees who suddenly face more dangerous work conditions, but it seems that it's the government's fault.

"... 18 for women and 10 for men" — #11 on "Twelve shocking facts about North Korea," according to Pravda.

Also:

9. One does not allow [sic] to turn the government radio off even in one's own house. One can only turn the volume down a bit. There are special units that track down those who listen to forbidden radio programs, and this crime is punishable by death.

And:

12. In the event of a fire, the first thing to rescue from a burning home must be portraits of DPRK leaders.

ADDED: What would you save if you have to rush out of your burning house? That's an old question, but the classic old answer doesn't work anymore, because we keep our photographs — including our photographs of beloved leaders — on some website. Grab your iPhone and your car keys and get out of there. Anything else?

IN THE COMMENTS: George M. Spencer writes:

Generally speaking, human life means little in Asia.

That's the first sentence of the Pravda article.

Isn't most of Russia in Asia!?!

I had to look back at the article, because I didn't believe that line would be on the news site, even at Pravda, but it is indeed the first sentence of the article.

"... no one knows how everything would turn out for the country. The Russians have at least 5,000 nuclear warheads, and clearly, someone needs to keep an eye on the goddamned order. Putin has been good at it.... He is cool. Clearly, one has to get rid of someone at times, but I mean that the CIA also throws people under the bus, but, perhaps, they do it more accurately."

Said Dolph Lundgren, quoted in Pravda. I hadn't clicked on my Pravda bookmark in a long time. I'd had it squirreled away in a lesser folder — labeled "other news," as opposed to "main news," which are both under "news." I was surprised to find something bloggable (and new).

Lundgren was born in Sweden, and English is not his first language, but he's been living in L.A. for a long time. He's been famous in the U.S. since 1985, when he got to punch Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky IV":

"I walked in to a Westwood movie theater as Grace Jones' boyfriend and walked out ninety minutes later as the movie star Dolph Lundgren. I was shell-shocked for years from the mind-boggling and daunting experience of being a student-athlete from tiny Sweden suddenly having to live up a new action-star persona."

So he speaks English. I think he knows what he's saying. You see what he's saying here: "Clearly, one has to get rid of someone at times, but I mean that the CIA also throws people under the bus, but, perhaps, they do it more accurately." That implies: Sometimes the government must surreptitiously kill an inconvenient person, and the only difference between Putin and the CIA is messiness.

And while I'm looking at Putin news, I found this in The Hill, something Putin said at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday. Responding to a question, he talked about the disrespect for President Trump in the United States:

"Inside the country, disrespect is shown for him. This is a regrettable negative component of the U.S. political system," Putin said.

He's right that disrespecting the President is an inherent part of the American system. Every President is disrespected. It's what we do in a democracy. Myself, I don't regret it or regard is as negative. I'm an American. It's what we do. I'm not going to disrespect the disrespect. I observe it. It's our culture. I'm a little blasé about it, because I've been observing it since I was able to get the gist of newspaper headlines and it took the form of saying all Eisenhower does is golf.

[Putin] continued, saying that "one can argue but one can’t show disrespect, even not for him personally but for those people who voted for him."

Of course, we can show disrespect, and we do. But he means one shouldn't show disrespect. And he makes something of a good point, and it's close to something I think: The people who preferred Trump won, a legitimate victory means a lot, and those who lost should try to understand their own country, not demonize their fellow citizens.

"Mr. Trump was elected by the American people. And at least for this reason, it is necessary to show respect for him, even if you do not agree with some of his positions," he added.

Trump is getting respect for this, just not complete respect and not from everyone.

The Russian leader told his audience that those who ascend to the highest office in the U.S. possess a "certain talent" that allows them to survive America's bruising political process. "I believe that the president of the United States does not need any advice because one has to possess certain talent and go through this trial to be elected, even without having the experience of such big administrative work. He [Trump] has done this," the Russian leader said. "He won honestly."

I assume Putin knew those last 3 words were inflammatory, coming from him, and that he got a bang out of saying them, tweaking the Trump-disrespecters who jump at clues of collusion. Even as he's lecturing us about settling down and accepting the reality that our system produced President Trump, he's agitating the haters and resisters.

There’s no way to know what goes on within a family, but if the slain service member designated his mother to receive a payout for what is basically the calculated value of his life, and decided his father should not receive any benefit from his death, there was a reason why....

More alarming, though—and separate from the role of the beneficiary—is that President Trump’s personal payment to this Army dad may ultimately threaten the unity of American military families.... The feeling that we’re all in it together... is imperiled by Trump’s offer of a payout to one individual...

The existing system of compensation works. The status quo satisfies. If it doesn’t, then there’s a real conversation to be had....

The source told us, “In one group therapy session, Harvey arrived 15 minutes late. Then, when it was his turn to speak, he launched into a speech about how this is all a conspiracy against him.”...

Another source close to Weinstein says... “He insists he never raped or assaulted anyone, and that all the encounters were consensual. He realizes he has acted like an a–hole, but he still insists he’s not a rapist...."

Much of what people are accusing him of is criminal. How is he supposed to participate in group therapy if frank, sincere discussion would entail confessing to crimes? Both sources seem to be revealing that Weinstein is doing something I would regard as taking it seriously: being defensive against criminal liability. I'm sure that defensiveness is annoying to everyone else, especially if they think he's lying. But that doesn't make him unserious. It just makes him serious within a frame of reference that isn't how to stop being addicted to sex.

I haven't looked deeply into the evidence question, but I think generally the patient has a privilege to prevent other members of a therapy group from testifying, but the particulars are going to vary from place to place. You lawyers who are reading this: What would you say to someone in Weinstein's position who's trying to rehabilitate his business reputation by appearing to take his "sex addition" problem seriously, but who will be talking about things that could be used against him in a criminal (or civil) case?

And who are these people leaking information about what went on in group therapy? How can anyone feel secure about opening up in these sessions? I note that the Page Six article quotes the second source as saying that Weinstein doesn't do group sessions anymore — "for obvious reasons." If it's so obvious, why did he ever do them?

The Patterson–Gimlin film (also known as the Patterson film or the PGF) is an American short motion picture of an unidentified subject which the filmmakers have said was a Bigfoot. The footage was shot in 1967 in Northern California, and has since been subjected to many attempts to authenticate or debunk it....

The film was shot 50 years ago today, if you can believe the filmmakers' account, but even that is questioned.

Patterson said he became interested in Bigfoot after reading an article about the creature by Ivan T. Sanderson in True magazine in December 1959. In 1961 Sanderson published his encyclopedic Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, a worldwide survey of accounts of Bigfoot-type creatures, including recent track finds, etc. in the Bluff Creek area, which heightened his interest....

"In 1962 he visited Bluff Creek and talked with a whole host of Bigfoot-believers. In 1964 he returned and met a timber-cruiser named Pat Graves, who drove him to Laird Meadows. There Patterson saw fresh tracks—for him an almost unbearably exciting, spine-chilling experience. What a tremendous feat it would be—what a scientific breakthrough—if he could obtain unshakable evidence that these tracks were not the work of a prankster, but the actual mark of a hitherto unknown creature! If he succeeded, he would be famous! And rich!..."

Almost unyetiably exciting. No it isn't. I can't possibly read this, the most overlong article I've ever seen in Wikipedia. I am out of here....

Said Aaron Courtney, a 31-year-old African-American high school football coach, about why he hugged a man who was wearing a swastika T-shirt. At the link is the viral video of the hug, with Courtney saying "Why don’t you like me, dog?"

“I had the opportunity to talk to someone who hates my guts and I wanted to know why. During our conversation, I asked him, ‘Why do you hate me? What is it about me? Is it my skin color? My history? My dreadlocks?’” he told the Daily News.

But the man simply looked off into the distance and brushed off his questions as Courtney pleaded with him and grew increasingly upset.

It should be noted that before this happened, the man, Randy Furniss, was "surrounded by a crowd of protesters who screamed, punched and spat on him."

“After beating around the bush, and avoiding my questions, I asked him, I pleaded with him, I almost broke out in tears, growing increasingly angry because I didn’t understand,” he said.... The crowd around them immediately reacted and when Courtney pressed him again, asking “Why do you hate me?” Furniss finally answered, “I don’t know.”

“I believe that was his sincere answer. He really doesn’t know,” Courtney said.

Furniss was surrounded and in a physically dangerous situation. What could he do? And that hug was a big physical encroachment on him. Even loving hugs should be consented to, but it's not clear — I've seen the video — that the hug expresses love. I think if I were in that situation — not that I'd wear a swastika T-shirt...

... I would experience the question "Why don’t you like me, dog?" as threatening.

I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between love and hate.

"He also told her to tell police to care for his mother's ashes. Burd was arrested a short time later and charged with first-degree sexual abuse, first-degree rape, second-degree burglary and third-degree kidnapping."

"This revulsion is just another form of self-indulgence... It isn’t as if Barack Obama doesn’t realize what he is doing and what is happening in this self-enriching bubble he has shaped, post presidency.... He can’t seem to help himself."

"... a decision that Cooper Hefner, a top executive at the magazine, said on Thursday was in keeping with its founding mission of embracing changing attitudes about sex," the NYT reports.

Selecting [Ines] Rau “very much speaks to the brand’s philosophy,” said Mr. Hefner, 26, Playboy’s chief creative officer. “It’s the right thing to do. We’re at a moment where gender roles are evolving.”

Mr. Hefner said he selected Ms. Rau to be a Playmate two months ago because she’s “lovely” and has “a remarkable personality,” but also to resolidify the magazine’s voice. “This is really a moment for us to take a step back and say that so much of what the brand stood for in the early years is very much still alive in culture.”

Resolidify. I didn't know what to do, so I looked up "resolidify" in the Oxford English Dictionary, where I go to resolidify. It means "To make (something, esp. a melted substance) solid again; to solidify (something) again."

Here in Wisconsin, I see that Republican state Rep. Andre Jacque has introduced a bill to make animal abuse a felony (instead of a misdemeanor) and to "close a loophole changing the definition of sexual contact to be more inclusive of contact with any part of an animal for sexual gratification."

Wrote Barack Obama to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear, in one of the excerpts from letters, dated 1982 to 1984, that were released from the collection at Emory University, reported at WaPo.

“I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, the foreign friends in the international business world,” Obama writes McNear in one letter. “Caught without a class, a structure, or a tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me.”...

“I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself... I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs... The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.”

“I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between romantic love and the more quotidian, but perhaps finer bonds of friendship... but I can feel the progression from one to the other (in my mind).”

A friend of Miss McNear [said]: "Alex is so embarrassed about this coming out right now. She has a family and is a grown up, for her to be called somebody's 'girlfriend' is really making her cringe. It was all in the past but her family still tease her about it. I know her sisters say they would have liked to have been in the White House, but ce la vie [sic]. To think she could have been First Lady, and she married a boxer instead. You couldn't make it up."

IN THE COMMENTS: MathMom said:

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs..."

I had to stop reading there. My heart began to pound, my hands began to sweat, I felt dizzy and disoriented...I was reading about intentional cultural appropriation, and that by a revered statesman! Our former president!

What Obama was unconsciously pointing out is that multiculturalism is not a goal. It, like anarchy, is a tool to break down the existing society. The goal is a totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Socialism insists that all individuals are literally identical, and it adopts policies to make sure that they are identical. These policies are, of course, brutal. There can be no White or black persons, no Jews or Christians, no Hispanics, etc. Socialist man is a single, homogeneous thing.

Said Quentin Tarantino, accepting responsibility for continuing to work with Harvey Weinstein. Tarantino knew some — who could know all? — of what Weinstein did. He made choices that were in his self-interest at the time, and it has now become so obvious — Mira Sorvino was his girlfriend — that it's also in his self-interest to do a mea culpa now.

“I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said, citing several episodes involving prominent actresses. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.”

“I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard,” he added. “If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him.”

Done the work? Is that psychotherapy talk or is he using the term in some other way? He admits that anything he says now sounds like a crappy excuse, so he knows "if I had done the work" is a crappy excuse.

I think, reading the article carefully, that "done the work" means that he should have taken the parts of the story he knew were real — Sorvino, Rose McGowan, and another actress the NYT doesn't name — and inferred the existence of "a larger pattern of abuse." I'm sorry, I don't believe that 3 solid data points plus all the rumors don't force an intelligent person to hypothesize that there is a modus operandi. I think Tarantino would have had to have done work to distance himself from the obvious and to view the 3 things he knew as isolated instances.

I put the right 2 sentences in the post title. He tells us the "work" he did: "What I did was marginalize the incidents."

When Mr. Tarantino read the articles about Mr. Weinstein, he was horrified by the scope and severity of the alleged abuse, especially the rape accusations, he said. But some of the accounts were deeply familiar to him. “Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of those incidents” chronicled in the first few articles, he said. “It was impossible they didn’t.”

Everyone who was close to Harvey facilitated him.

Now Mr. Tarantino said he regretted not taking the women’s stories seriously enough. “I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s O.K. That’s the egg on my face right now.”

Oh, please! He's talking about the late 90s, four decades after the era of laughing at the image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk. The use of the corny old expression "egg on my face" is a tell. There's no way he wasn't up to speed on what sexual harassment and sexual assault are. I cared about his movies back then. "Pulp Fiction." "Jackie Brown." If I had thought at the time that he had the mindset he's now claiming to have had, I wouldn't have been interested in that idiot's movies. But he is not an idiot. He's a man who did what was in his interest then, and he's doing what's in his interest now.

Asked how the news about Mr. Weinstein would affect how the public views his own record and body of work, Mr. Tarantino paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t.”

It does.

"I hope it doesn't" is the last sentence of the article, and I wondered whether the NYT, having given the man a nice platform for his mea culpa, was ending with a nudge to the reader to react the way I did: This changes the meaning of your movies.

But one thing makes me think this was not the intent of the NYT: They've disallowed comments.

Why doesn't Lupita Nyong’o get the same protection from comments undercutting her opinion that the NYT gave Tarantino? What bargaining goes on behind the scenes as these famous names give their stories to the newspaper? Maybe the difference is just that Nyong'o will be seen as a victim and the prediction was that comments will praise her for her courage in telling her story now, but Tarantino looks like a facilitator and there was a real risk that commenters would say things like what I've said here.

Nyong'o concedes that she was part of "the conspiracy of silence that has allowed this predator to prowl for so many years." Her excuse is that she "felt very much alone" and "blamed myself for a lot of it," but now can tell her story because she can see it and explain it as "part of [Weinstein's] sinister pattern of behavior."

Harvey led me into a bedroom — his bedroom — and announced that he wanted to give me a massage.... I began to massage his back to buy myself time to figure out how to extricate myself from this undesirable situation. Before long he said he wanted to take off his pants. I told him not to do that and informed him that it would make me extremely uncomfortable. He got up anyway to do so and I headed for the door... I opened the door and stood by the frame. He put his shirt on and again mentioned how stubborn I was. I agreed with an easy laugh, trying to get myself out of the situation safely. I was after all on his premises, and the members of his household, the potential witnesses, were all (strategically, it seems to me now) in a soundproof room....

I didn’t quite know how to process the massage incident. I reasoned that it had been inappropriate and uncalled-for, but not overtly sexual. I was entering into a business where the intimate is often professional and so the lines are blurred.....

[On another occasion, at some bar or restaurant in NYC] Harvey arrived and the assistant immediately disappeared... [H]e announced: “Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.” I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.

She declined, and he backed off, saying "Then I guess we are two ships passing in the night,"* an expression she'd never heard before. He told her to go, and she did. She worried that he would hurt her career, but she offers no evidence that he did. Not long afterward, Nyong'o appeared in the movie "12 Years a Slave," and she won an Oscar. She never worked on a Weinstein project. She adopted a "survival plan" of "avoid[ing] Harvey and men like him at all costs." And that plan worked for her, but now she wants to be part of "a sisterhood — and brotherhood of allies" that can outweigh the power of individuals like Weinstein.

I wrote all that before reading any comments. They do — as I think the NYT could predict — praise Nyong'o lavishly. The top-rated comment is: "What an incredible young woman who can say, 'I would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking...' This is exactly what a mother wants in a role model for her daughter. Absolutely brilliant."

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

“Arrested Development” actor-comedian David Cross recently found himself in hot ham water after Asian American actress Charlyne Yi shared an uncomfortable memory with her Twitter followers:

Charlyne Yi ✔ @charlyne_yi
I think about the first time I met David Cross ten years ago & he made fun of my pants (that were tattered because I was poor). Dumbfounded I stared at him speechless and he said to me "what's a matter? You don't speak English?? Ching-chong-ching-chong".

She must hate him to dredge that up out of context now. You can read the tweets that followed and Cross's effort to explain. It happened in Shreveport, and I must have been referencing Shreveport by doing a Southern redneck racist character, not my actual self.

I did enjoy the "hot ham water" link.

And if you've forgotten about "hipster racism," here's the Wikipedia article on the subject:

Hipster racism, is engaging in behaviors traditionally regarded as racist and defending them as being performed ironically or satirically.... Van Kerckhove used the term hipster racism in an article, "The 10 biggest race and pop culture trends of 2006" [PDF]...

There’s this smug elitism to it; this cultural elitism. The whole thing is, You’re perpetuating this. This thing you report to hate and you think is such a bad example of our culture, that exists because people like you talk about it with detached irony, yet you’re still supporting its very existence.

The OED homepage has a list of "recently published" words. Right now it's:

augurate, v.
disallowing, n.
disappointable, adj.
flâneuse, n.

Try to use them all in one sentence.

"Augurate" is familiar as 80% of the word "inaugurate," but it's more easily understood by seeing the word "augur," which means to predict the future using signs and omens. I don't see why you'd ever need "augurate" when you have "augur," but it's in some old books, so you might need to look it up. But I wonder how "inaugurate" got started. The etymology does go back to using "omens from the flight of birds, to consecrate or install after taking such omens or auguries."

"Disallowing" is one of those words that, if you use it, some pendants will inform you, is not a word. But the OED found lots of old examples, e.g., "A petition..against the disallowing of the drawbacks on calicoes and foreign linens, was offered to be presented to the house" (1764).

"Disappointable" needs no explanation. Example: "Idealists..are very disappointable people—disappointed in themselves for failing their own high expectations and in others" (Colorado Springs Gazette, 1985).

"Flâneuse" is easy if you know "flâneur" and understand French endings. A "flâneuse" is "A woman who saunters around observing life and society; a leisurely woman about town." There's an example from 1879, but I like that the OED has a quote from just last July (in the Sunday Telegraph): "Elkin has written a delightfully meandering study of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and other female flâneuses who dared to stroll." The italics seem to indicate that the Telegraph believed it was using a French word. But the OED is proclaiming it an English word.

Now, I want to get out and saunter around, observing life and society in Madison, Wisconsin, but I invite you to use the 4 newly official English words in one sentence.

"Its big, bright fruiting bodies scatter in great numbers across mossy forests of North America and Europe. They emerge from the soil first like white eggs, abandoned by some mysterious creature of the woods. They can grow up to a foot tall, as warts appear on the cap. The mushroom often blushes red in the process. Finally, they crack open and flatten into a polka-dot disc that would make a gnome’s perfect dinner plate...."

The photos of the mushrooms are very cool, but this is what caught my eye:

They are called the fly agaric because in some places, people lace milk with bits of it to lure and kill flies. The insects become inebriated, crash into walls and die, according to the blog of Tom Volk, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

Click on that word "blog" to see some eye-searing retro website design (from 1999) that might cause you to become inebriated and crash into walls. You will not die, but you will be sucked into a past that is a place you will find hard to believe ever existed.

Klein tells us that the chemicals in the mushroom, ibotenic acid and muscimol, can cause "dry mouth and rapid heartbeat to euphoria, hallucinations, feeling closer to God and fear."

I had all those effects just looking at the mycologist's website.

ADDED: I remember where I've seen those mushrooms. On this nutty book from that caused a freakout in 1970:

"[John Marco] Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of the ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria [fly agaric] as the Eucharist. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure and was a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin."

Wrote 4th Circuit Judge Stephanie D. Thacker, responding to dissenting Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory, who said that the fact that the 40-foot cross had gone unchallenged for 90 years is a reason to let it stay where it is, on a highway median in Prince George’s County.

The initial challenge in Maryland was brought by the American Humanist Association, a Washington-based group that represents atheists and others. The group did not dispute the monument is a memorial, but said in court that a giant cross on government property sends a message of exclusion in violation of the First Amendment....

At oral argument last December, Thacker and Wynn suggested the legal issues could be resolved outside of court by moving the site of the cross — or by cutting off the arms of the cross to form an obelisk.

What message is sent by the government's cutting off the "arms" of a cross?! Talk about a cure worse than the disease. Were these judges joking?

I'm linking to the Washington Post because that's where I first saw the story, but I was confused by its statement that the cross "has marked a major intersection in Prince George’s County for 90 years" and "had been public property for 50 years without a constitutional challenge." Here's the actual judicial opinion, with the statement "the Cross has stood unchallenged for 90 years."

If the Post is leaving such glaring mistakes, what does that suggest about about the things that are hard to notice and check? The linked article has been up since 2:57 PM yesterday. Does nobody over there at least try to clean up embarrassing shoddiness?

Also, now that I'm reading the opinion, I see that the idea of cutting off the "arms" of the cross seems to have come not from the judges but the appellants. Footnote 7:

Appellants later clarified their desired injunctive relief as removal or demolition of the Cross, or removal of the arms from the Cross “to form a non-religious slab or obelisk.” [Joint Appendix] 131.

This question of giving special respect to old monuments goes back to something Justice Breyer wrote in one of the 10 Commandments cases in 2005. Breyer's vote was the deciding vote, and as I explained back in 2011, when issue of the day was "Big Mountain Jesus":

Justice Breyer quoted the 1963 school prayer opinion written by Justice Goldberg: "[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious."

And Breyer concluded that taking down the old stone monument in Texas would "exhibit a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions" and "encourage disputes concerning the removal of longstanding depictions of the Ten Commandments from public buildings across the Nation," which would "create the very kind of religiously based divisiveness that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid."

That's the prevailing Supreme Court precedent to which we can compare the new 4th Circuit case. Think about that quote in the post title: "Perhaps the longer a violation persists, the greater the affront to those offended." But the longer the monument persists, the more taking it down feels like a message of hostility to religion.

Or do you think the people watching the arms cut off a cross would see the symbolic meaning as the enforcement of Establishment Clause values?

By the way, the obelisk originally "symbolized the sun god Ra, and during the brief religious reformation of Akhenaten was said to be a petrified ray of the Aten, the sundisk."

"Joseph Sells Grain" by Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1655).

The struggle to purge religion from public view will go on forever, because there is just too much religion embedded everywhere. To try to remove one thing is to create something else:

"... from about a thousand pieces of campaign literature, a move Fairfax called a 'mistake' and that has stoked tensions within the Democratic ticket and threatens to alienate African American voters three weeks before Election Day. The palm cards with photos of Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring (D) were produced for canvassers with the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which asked that Fairfax be excluded because it did not endorse him. Fairfax has spoken critically of two proposed natural gas pipelines that the union supports."

It's a "mistake" only in the sense that what they did completely intentionally has received attention and made them look bad. And do you even believe the explanation for why they did it? These were palm cards with photos. I would guess that the party is afraid that black people who see a photo of a black face will decide that's the one to vote for.

ADDED: I'm misreading this, so my guess there is wrong. Northam is the only Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor. So the Democrats can't be accused of trying to redirect black voters to a white candidate. They may be trying to hide the black candidate from voters who don't like or are skeptical of black candidates, but I'm willing to believe the union's argument: they don't like his position on pipelines and didn't mind risking alienating black people (until it got too much attention).

IN THE COMMENTS: cubanbob said:

So the Democrats are hiding the candidate the union rank and file would be against since he is against their interests. That's the problem for the Democrats; too many interest groups to placate and many of them at cross purposes.

I'm noticing the BRIEF FOR CAKE ARTISTS AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF NEITHER PARTY (PDF) in the pending Supreme Court case — Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Phillips — about whether there's a religious freedom exemption to the requirement not to discriminate against gay people.

I love this brief. It says what I believe I've been saying in numerous posts. It's not a question of whether people with a religious objection to same-sex marriage can refuse to sell all manner of goods and services to gay customers. Nor is about about whether the cakeshop is forced to "bake a cake" for the wedding. It's about whether it must decorate the cake — apply icing and other materials to the surface of the cake to shape images and write words that say something substantive about the wedding.

From the brief:

Amici take no position as to which party should prevail in this specific case. Their interest lies in making a single point—that their work, like that of petitioner Jack Phillips, requires artistic exertion within an expressive endeavor to generate works of art. Many of the amici listed below would gladly have prepared the cake that respondents requested—but they would have done so by accepting a commission to create a work of edible art. Amici wish to illustrate—literally, through the images of their own work in this brief—that cake design and preparation is an art....

Cakes for every conceivable occasion, ranging from the grandeur of weddings to abject apologies, can convey articulable messages. Sometimes words are used to assist in conveying those messages. But the art of custom cake design and creation is not so limited. Other times, the art behind a cake is simply sheer beauty or the technical mastery that it required. Cake artists must be adept at a multitude of artistic endeavors beyond simply “baking.” They must have visual-arts skills to design a cake that is pleasing to the eye—painting, drawing, and sculpting. They need the skills of an interior designer to create a unified whole from a series of individually artistic elements. They require the grace and technical powers of an architect, so that the final product moves from the theoretical to the real....

[C]ustom wedding cakes—even of the traditional variety—typically involve subtle elements that reflect the personality of the new couple (and perhaps the artist).... Cakes can still be instantly identifiable as part of the wedding genre yet involve stunning and unique elements that appear only as part of a special design.

The argument continues in this vein, with many more photographs of cakes, so please go to the link and see.

At one point, the argument turns to "America’s multi-cultural traditions" and shows an example of a very distinctive cake celebrating a wedding and the couple's Indian cultural heritage:

Even as a wedding cake carries a message about the wedding, the photograph of the cake conveys a legal argument: Art can come in cake form and the expression contained in cake can be complex and even — bonk you over the head, liberal Justices — multi-cultural.

This has me thinking that gayness is also a culture within "America’s multi-cultural traditions." A cake for a same-sex wedding might be a generic cake, but the Cake Artists wouldn't give this couple just another cake. They'd get specific. Yes, I'm seeing the brief goes in this direction at page 16. Some of the Cake Artists on the brief make cakes for same-sex weddings, and they make them a specific expression of gay pride. I'd been thinking of the expression in terms of the icing and other stuff on the outside of the cake, but the brief describes a cake with coloring in the batter, so that the cake-cutting at the reception would be a performance: revealing a rainbow.

That idea of performance is used, later in the brief, to counter the argument that cakes are transitory food:

But the fact that any given cake is a vanishing work does not distinguish it from artistic performances on the stage (or, indeed, protests on the street). Nature’s beauty is no less revealed through the flower that blooms for a single day than through the tree that lives for a thousand years; likewise, an ice sculpture is not inherently less artistic than one carved from stone....

That's getting poetic. Are legal briefs art?

The conclusion is not about who ought to win the case, but only "that cake artists are indeed practitioners of an expressive art and that they are entitled to the same respect under the First Amendment as artists using any other medium."

October 18, 2017

"But at some point I fight back, and it won't be pretty," said Donald Trump on a radio show when he was asked about John McCain's speech complaining about "half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems."

McCain's line sounds nasty as he delivered it (which you can see at the link), but really isn't that bad if you examine it word for word. He's not denouncing "nationalism," just nationalism that's not good enough. And he's saying he prefers to solve problems. That is, he's not that interested in ideas, and yet maybe he would be interested in an idea — including nationalism — if the people using it would develop it in a careful and serious way.

I'm also interested in the mixed metaphor because of the effort to keep it unmixed by pairing "half-baked" with "cooked" and then wrecking it with "scapegoats." Though goats can be cooked, a scapegoat is not cooked, but sent out into the wilderness.

Looking at that picture, I wondered if the "scape" in "scapegoat" was like the "scape" in "landscape," but the OED tells me it's like the "scape" in "escape.” "Landscape" comes from the Dutch "landschap," with the "schap" part being like the "-ship" ending in words like "friendship" and "scholarship." The word "landscape" began in painting, and I did like that painting of the scapegoat in the landscape. I'd like to title it "Goatscape."

"Known for lush, larger-than-life portraits that overlay black street culture with European classical motifs, Wiley is an exciting choice for the presidential portrait. Imaginably, the New York-based artist will have a novel spin on the traditionally formal composition. Wiley has painted rapper LL Cool J in the style of John Singer Sargent, Ice T as Emperor Napoleon by David and young African American men in stained glass tableaus, like saints in a cathedral."

Quartz reports (showing examples of Wiley's work to give you an idea of what the Obama portrait might looks like).

I'm reading that at Instapundit, but instead of clicking through to Investor's Business Daily, I follow my well-worn path to The New York Times, where I still believe I'm going to get the official news, the real news, the professional news.

At the NYT, the headline is: "With Loss of Its Caliphate, ISIS May Return to Guerrilla Roots." So, we have a great victory — don't we? — but we can't take a moment to feel good about it. Immediately, we plunge into doubt. Maybe we're even worse off if these people don't have their territory. That's the vibe at the NYT article. Here's how it begins:

Its de facto capital is falling. Its territory has shriveled from the size of Portugal to a handful of outposts. Its surviving leaders are on the run.

But rather than declare the Islamic State and its virulent ideology conquered, many Western and Arab counterterrorism officials are bracing for a new, lethal incarnation of the jihadi group.

The organization has a proven track record as an insurgency able to withstand major military onslaughts, while still recruiting adherents around the world ready to kill in its name.

Islamic State leaders signaled more than a year ago that they had drawn up contingency plans to revert to their roots as a guerrilla force after the loss of their territory in Iraq and Syria. Nor does the group need to govern cities to inspire so-called lone wolf terrorist attacks abroad, a strategy it has already adopted to devastating effect in Manchester, England, and Orlando, Fla....

Read the whole thing. It continues in that vein. It ends by saying that al Qaeda might win back the young hotheads who'd been attracted to ISIS and frightens/titillates us with the idea of a newer, younger bin Laden:

The older group has been urging followers to pivot from the Islamic State’s focus on the battlefields of the Middle East and instead put an emphasis on attacks in the United States and other foreign lands. It has also been promoting a younger, charismatic new leader: Hamza bin Laden, 27, the son of Osama.

"And we all stood side-by-side with only paste-ons covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating lineup, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.... I asked to speak to a producer about the unrealistic diet regime and he responded by telling me he didn't know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly 'fuckable.'"

Said Jennifer Lawrence, at Elle's Women in Hollywood, giving us a glimpse of the kind of female producers you get in Hollywood.

Listen up, columnists who proffer the solution of putting some more women in positions of executive power.* Women do hurt other women, and they can do it in a system in which the men are out to sexually exploit women. For one thing, some women are into sexually dominating/humiliating other women. For another, if the men are structuring the workplace around their own sexual interests, the women who rise within the power structure may be the ones who play along, facilitate, and demonstrate what tough gals they are. And then there's just good old fashioned woman-on-woman cruelty — all that envy and the burning desire to be The Woman.

_________________________

* For example, NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg, who reacted to the Harvey Weinstein story with "Put Women in Charge" (though, to her credit, she said, "Obviously, female bosses can be abusive and can create cultures where abusive behavior toward underlings is tolerated"):

Feminism’s energy has shifted left, toward women who want to dismantle the ruling class, not diversify it. When “broader female access to executive perches in Wall Street and Silicon Valley gets treated as some sort of movement-wide victory, then something clearly has gone wrong in our understanding of what feminism is and can do,” Jessa Crispin wrote in The New Republic. ...

Nevertheless, as long as we have a hierarchal society, the gender of those at the top matters....

Wow. I thought — even knowing Trump's penchant for defending himself — that he'd have kept silent on this one.

A woman's husband had died, Trump made a 5-minute telephone call, and Rep. Frederica Wilson, claiming to have been sitting with the widow and listening to the conversation on the speakerphone, went public with a snippet of quote from the conversation — the man "knew what he signed up for... but when it happens it hurts anyway" — and to assert that the widow remarked that Trump didn't remember the dead man's name.

The man's name was La David Johnson, and I'm thinking that if Trump resisted saying the name, perhaps he worried that he didn't have the right name: Could it really be La David? Is that a man's name?

And what was the whole context of the conversation? The chain of words "knew what he signed up for" could appear in a good-enough message of condolence. I've heard this idea expressed many times. It's one way that we praise those in the all-volunteer military. They are courageous and generous to put their lives on the line for us.

But I chose not to say anything like that yesterday, because I believed in the etiquette of giving priority to the widow's grief. The power of Congresswoman Wilson's speech was, I would have thought, that you can't respond to it. Common sense says: You'll only make it worse. You'll be taking the bait, giving the story another day of life and creating new evidence that will be used against you.

But Trump — the man is not normal — did not take the common-sense approach and keep silent. He's a man who fights back. His response is pretty good and in classic Trump style: "Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!"

He goes after the Congresswoman (and doesn't mention the widow, whose exposure was all the Congresswoman's doing).

He tells us the Congresswoman is a Democrat. We might stop there and say: This is politics. A Trump-hater, probably, taking the awful step of appropriating the widow's grief for political purposes.

Or we might read more about her. In the article I linked to (in The Daily Mail), I see that she — like the widow and the dead soldier — is African-American. She's also rich, 74 years old, misses a lot of votes in Congress, and avoided the Trump inauguration. Now, I'm thinking way too much about Wilson, but the question is: Did she lie? Who knows? I assume she at least presented what she knew in a manner that would hurt Trump. This becomes another Democratic Party in Trumpland story.

The claim that he has "proof" and the closing shot "Sad!" are classic Trump. Whether he has good enough character can't matter when he doesn't have enough characters (in the Twitter sense). Can it?

Of course it can, especially to people who already hate him. But they can't hate him anymore than they already do. Those who love Trump, I suspect, will accept "(and I have proof). Sad!" It's brusque — so is "he knew what he signed up for." But that's Trump, the man they love.

As for the people who neither love nor hate Trump, the lovers and haters might think such people do not exist. He's the ultimate love-him-or-hate-him guy. But I'm here to tell you there are such people. It's weird. But we exist.

I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly, and I found it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate. A lot of the feelings I’ve been having about anxiety, about being honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier or taking action. True disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger that I felt at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.

And I wish I could tell you that that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly, it wasn’t. I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault, and I don’t speak about them very often, but after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight, the things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I felt less alone this week than I’ve ever felt in my entire career.

The answer to the question in my post title seems to be: I wanted the job. It sounds as though she was made to understand the conditions of employment, when she could have gone to the police, and that she decided to join a conspiracy of silence.

She was only 16 years old, which makes the crime worse and her failure to report it more forgivable, but if she was 16, she was surely represented, and there was someone there on her side, someone with much more experience and understanding of how the business works. Yes, I see the word "agents" in that first paragraph. Did the girl's own agent participate in grooming her into the Hollywood life?

You haven't been a girl for a long time, Ms. Witherspoon. I appreciate your confession to "guilt for not speaking up earlier or taking action," but you are saying this after reaping rewards for 25 years, while other girls entered the system and faced a man you could have exposed in 1991. You say you feel "less alone" now, but had the power all this time to help other women feel "less alone." What held you back? Somebody else had to go first? Some reporter (like, today, Ronan Farrow) needed to build a substantial structure around you and others to make it safe?

Why was there no Ronan Farrow in 1991?

1991 was the year that the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded that America understand sexual harrassment, as it grilled Clarence Thomas on charges of sexual harassment. There, the allegations were not about any physical assault, but pressure to go on dates and some remarks about pornography and pubic hair, and the person on the receiving end was no teenager but a Yale-Law-School-trained adult. Once those allegations were taken seriously as sexual harassment, why were there no journalists looking to break stories?

Why wouldn't someone have talked to the Women of Hollywood?

I hear my readers yelling at the computer screen: Because of politics. Sexual harassment was only taken seriously in 1991 as a means to an end, to defeat the conservative Supreme Court nominee. And the Men of Hollywood were liberals and donors to liberal causes and therefore the journalists had no motivation to go looking. Looking the other way was the means to what was the same political end. That's the obvious hypothesis. (It could also be that the knowing, sophisticated journalists understood the desire for sex and didn't want to blow up the whole game. Perhaps they themselves or their loved ones would be vulnerable if rampant exposure got going.)

This has been one hell of a conspiracy of silence. It's full of so many people — people we like, such Reese Witherspoon.

Behind the glossy, smiling faces of the Women of Hollywood, I see a crowd of women's faces. I sense the ghostly presence of all of the women who no to the conspiracy, who didn't want the job enough to go along with a system that victimized them and victimized and would continue to victimize other women.

There's a long way to go to extract yourself from the harm, Ms. Witherspoon. Feeling guilty for not speaking up earlier is a good start. Now, how about naming the man you just referred to? You were 16, and I can look at your IMDB page and see what directors you worked with in 1991. I should think you'd name the man if only to avoid casting suspicion on the 2 or 3 other names from that time.

And what about all the "multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault"?

It's not enough to stand up at the Women in Hollywood event and spout generalities and say you feel empowered. If the truth doesn't pour out now, the conspiracy of silence will have won.

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical is a... product of the hippie counterculture and sexual revolution of the late 1960s... The musical's profanity, its depiction of the use of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality, its irreverence for the American flag, and its nude scene caused much comment and controversy. The musical broke new ground in musical theatre by defining the genre of "rock musical", using a racially integrated cast, and inviting the audience onstage for a "Be-In" finale.

If good intentions were golden, 'Hair,' at Joseph Papp's new Florence Sutro Anspacher Theater, would be great. As it is it is merely pretty good; an honest attempt to jolt the American musical into the nine-sixties, and a musical that is trying to relate to something other than Sigmund Romberg.

If it had a story — which to be honest it hasn't — that story would be about the young disenchanted, turned on by pot, switched off by the draft, living and loving, the new products of affluence, the dispossessed dropouts. That, if it had a story, would be what "Hair" is about.

Man, what an old fogey the NYT was! The reviewer was Clive Barnes.

I was 16 at the time, and I probably only heard about the show after it moved to Broadway. I scorned it, because it seemed that old people and commercial interests were trying to trade on the hippie movement, which seemed too pure and beautiful to have anything to do with Broadway. I didn't regard the music as rock music, so it was annoying to hear it called a "rock" musical. Like Clive Barnes, I resisted the show, but for what was — in "generation gap" terms — a completely different reason.

"... the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews. Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show...."The Hill reports.

Then I think about a couple of consensual experiences with men hugely my superiors. The come-ons took me by surprise, and flattered me, and seemed real. Like, of course I deserve this attention! I’m great! Or at least pretty great, right? In none of these instances was I chasing a job, or an affair either. I was flattered by the unexpected attention of a powerful man I respected. I knew I could learn from them; I enjoyed spending time with them. Also, by the way, they were married, so it was safe, right? I confidently spent time alone with them, believing they were interested in my mind and my work. Who wouldn’t be?

They weren’t. I would eventually learn that there was no actual relationship offer on the table, and no professional benefit either. And again I felt like: I am a fucking fool.

That sounds like she accepted a date and wanted a relationship (and even liked that the guy was an adulterer). Let's not mush everything together! This #MeToo stuff could get really stupid. At least she announces I am a fucking fool. I know, she means back then. But she's using the present tense.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Yeah, a married guy who chases after young women is safe--who thinks this way?

Absolutely no one. Joan Walsh, who is 59 years old, is still selling herself as a naive, innocent girl. She was going out with some other woman's husband, as far as I can tell. Look, we're in an important moment, when women can come together and support other women. Don't mess it up with bullshit like this.

"Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest.... During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced 'civilization' of Western Europe.... Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power.... Goebbels and Hitler were as obsessed with movies as American adolescents are today with social media. Convinced that cinema was their era’s main engine of cultural influence, they tried to control filmmaking as far as their influence could reach.... The dominance of American films had troubled European filmmakers and intellectuals from the beginning.... Hitler’s efforts to stem the mass appeal of Hollywood films and jazz only made them... more seductive and, in a final irony, prepared for the triumph of American music, jeans, and film in the postwar world by trying to make them taboo...."

I have... experienced the upside of not being a "perfect ten." As a proud feminist with little desire to diet, get plastic surgery or hire a personal trainer, I have almost no personal experience with men asking me to meetings in their hotel rooms. Those of us in Hollywood who don’t represent an impossible standard of beauty have the “luxury” of being overlooked and, in many cases, ignored by men in power unless we can make them money.

She overplayed the comic idea of ugly privilege. Reverse lookism is dicier than you might think.

"Beside the sweeping views of the Birch, Maple and Sweetgum trees that fill the park, she can often see men and women having sex there in broad daylight. 'I saw a lot of b---jobs, guys having sex, guys masturbating, I really saw the whole gamut,' [NAME DELETED], who lived in the complex for five years, said. She moved out in August.... Construction workers noticed it when the building was being constructed, doorman David Lamboy said. At first, he thought the construction crew was exaggerating. But when a resident asked him to water the plants while she was on vacation, Lamboy saw it with his own eyes. 'I’m a lifelong New Yorker. I’ve seen many things, but what I saw that day shocked me,' the doorman recounted...."

“What I remember about this incident is that my sous chef came into my office, furious, telling me that ‘some fat fuck’ saying he’s an owner — he didn’t know the name — had come into the kitchen with a woman and shoved a $100 bill at him and told him to get out,” [Armin] Amiri told THR. “It was like 1:30 in the morning and he’d been the only one still there. The chef told me he was going to quit.” Later, Amiri said he saw Weinstein fix his belt behind the bar, but couldn’t see that there was a woman with him. While [Lauren] Sivan said Weinstein masturbated into a potted plant, Amiri recalls that he’d actually done it into a pot: When the chef picked up a pot placed on the stove, “It had been defiled,” Amiri recalled. “It was so bizarre. We couldn’t believe it happened."

That's improved my ideation around potted plants, but I never want to eat in a restaurant again.

"For people with a mysterious condition called 'visual snow,' that’s the frustrating, often agonizing daily reality: endless static, often accompanied by floating spots, bright flashes, trails of light, and other visual phenomena that make it hard to see or concentrate."